Ire-lands: Conflict and Negotiation in Landscape Intervention

Abstract

A catalytic approach to landscape architecture may have more pervasive effects than the traditional approach of developing a masterplan. Considering the magnitude of complexity that exists in the contemporary world, static masterplans often fail, or remain uncompleted. Landscape catalysts, or prototypes (projects whose positioning in the landscape cause other projects to happen, which in turn have an impetus for further action), accept political, sociological, economic, and other differences and uncertainties and work with them. Prototypes negotiate their development over time, they can be temporary or permanent, they can be big or they can be small. Prototypes have an agency in landscape architecture, not by resolving conflicts, but by setting up the conditions from which negotiations might begin.